1 – Meet with SAPPHIRE’s Radeon HD 6970

SAPPHIRE’s Radeon HD 6970 is a graphics card based on the new Cayman XT GPU. Compared to the Radeon HD 6870 based on Barts XT GPU, the Cayman comes with a new architecture. The vec5 units have been replaced by vec4 units and the rasterizer is now able to process 2 triangles per clock. And like NVIDIA’s GTX 500 Series, Radeon HD 6900 cards have a new power draw limiter called PowerTune. We’ll see it in action in the power consumption and overclocking part of this review.

In the overclocking side, SAPPHIRE’s product has some overclocking capabilities as we’ll see in the OC part of this review. What’s more, SAPPHIRE develops its own overclocking utility called TriXX. We’ll use it for pushing the HD 6970 to the maXX!